Like all cruisers, Shepard had living accommodations even more cramped than those on Titan, and it appeared to be equally overcrowded. Drew, again Terry’s roommate, arrived declaring, “We’re in luck to have this stateroom. Couples, even sublieutenants, are getting most of the double ones, so some of the single lieutenants are being crammed into ensigns’ quarters.”
“What’s being done with the ensigns, then?” Terry inquired.
“There don’t seem to be many, oddly enough. Nearly all those who did the maintenance work have gone back to Titan.”
The purpose of training cruises was to train ensigns; the role of full lieutenants was merely to supervise. Was it indeed just a way of getting them off Titan, then? For many couples to be assigned to a cruiser also suggested this. Considering the distances involved in Fleet operations and the fact that it was primarily a merchant rather than a military service, it would have been impractical to separate married officers; but they could not serve under the same unit commander and it would thus complicate scheduling.
No one had mentioned their destination, which in itself was strange. They had been told, however, that they should expect a long deployment. The ansible office had been mobbed, with nearly everyone trying to send last-minute interstellar messages to loved ones. Terry had been able to avoid the crowd since his mother was on Earth and could be contacted via ordinary comm channels, which he had done earlier in the day. He’d been glad, for once on board he had wanted only to retreat to his bunk before he found himself venting his rage on others who were no happier than he was to be aboard. Though his anger at Aldren’s refusal to intervene had faded, he was still furious over the unfairness of Admiral Derham’s stubborn unwillingness to reconsider.
To his surprise it was announced that Shepard would jump at 0800. That meant almost immediate departure from Titan and full-speed transit in normal space to get far enough out from the sun. Usually time was allowed for the crew to settle in first—not that the crew had much to do with jumping, as it was an AI-controlled maneuver handled almost entirely by the captain. And the pre-jump checkup had already been done. But the whole idea of a training cruise was for the ship’s crew to practice the entire process. What point was there in boarding them at the last minute, like passengers?
Terry slept poorly, his heart aching at the knowledge that he was being transported farther and farther from the telepathic contact he craved. Did telepathy work over distance? he wondered. Not interstellar distance; Aldren had told him that. Usually it could be used consciously only when people were near each other, though on the unconscious level, it could reach across an entire planet. Emergencies enhanced it. He was not sure how great an emergency it took, but if there proved to be no telepaths on the ship except maybe the captain, what did that matter?
He wondered why Aldren had seen him in a vision, and if there could be anything in the interpretation he’d put on it. An extraordinary destiny . . . that did not seem likely. He appeared to be destined for relegation to the ranks of officers who never had opportunity to achieve anything significant. Fleet was full of them: freighter crews, staff officers at headquarters, aides to the captains of liners whose main function was to socialize at dinner with the paying passengers. Many were capable people who had simply gotten stuck in the merchant branch of the service; but there were others initially assigned to exploration and terraforming who, through no fault of their own, had somehow fallen off that path. He had never thought this could happen to him . . . and now it was more vital than ever to stay on it, for he cared now, cared about more than just wanting to fly into uncharted regions. Having discovered more powers within himself than he’d been previously aware of, he felt his life would be empty if he could not make use of them in some way that mattered.
At breakfast he ate sparingly, too depressed to feel hungry. He had not been assigned any duties yet and it would certainly be some time before the patrollers were flown. He expected the day to drag.
Notice had been given that all hands were to report to the messdeck for briefing immediately after the jump. This was odd, Terry thought. Ordinarily the senior officers and patrol leaders would be briefed about planned exercises before anything was said to the rest of the crew. He sat glumly in the wardroom until the klaxon signaled that the jump had taken place and that Shepard was now in some other solar system, light-years away from Titan—he had no idea where. Then he made his way to the messdeck. It was so crowded that late arrivals had to stand, and he observed that “all hands” included even the cooks and other noncommissioned service personnel.
Captain Vargas entered alone, and at once there was silence. “I’ll get right to the point,” he said. “I know some of you are unhappy about being sent on a training cruise for which you feel you are overqualified. Well, I have good news for you. This is not a training cruise. It is a mission so secret that only a handful of top officials are aware of its true nature. The orders were that no one on board except myself was to be informed before we jumped.”
A murmur of excitement spread through the gathering. Not a training cruise? Whatever it involved was almost sure to be an improvement.
“You are bound to keep this secret in the future by the ESAs you signed—” the captain continued.
But he had never signed any ESA except the one covering the Flame project, Terry thought. His being here was wrong; there’d been another snafu. . . .
“—when you volunteered for special training. I can now tell you that everyone aboard this ship has had at least the first stage of that training, and you are free to discuss it among yourselves. Those of you not already on Titan were sent there specifically to learn the mind skills required to qualify you for this mission.”
Terry gasped. His original transfer hadn’t been a mistake, then. Had he been chosen for some special reason, or just because any officer whose ambitions were put on hold would be sure to volunteer out of boredom?
He sensed that many were wondering about this, and when Captain Vargas replied as if to a spoken question, Terry realized that he was indeed telepathically sensitive.
“Dr. Aldren and I chose the candidates together,” Vargas said, “he from psych profiles and I according to your proven skills. The central databank at Headquarters was made available to us. You can count it an honor to have been selected, for we picked only the best of the best. To those of you with experience, I won’t apologize for the frustration you felt at being transferred from your former posts without apparent reason—we need people who can handle themselves in unpredictable situations that may involve long periods of inaction. The responsibilities you will be given demand a good deal of maturity.”
But we didn’t finish the training, Terry thought. If we’re to use it, why were we pulled away too soon?
“You can stop regretting that you were reassigned before completing as much training as you’d anticipated,” Vargas went on. “You will have opportunity to continue it. When we reach our destination, neurofeedback facilities and qualified instructors will be brought aboard.”
But there were no qualified instructors other than Aldren and Roanna—Admiral Derham had said so. Perhaps he had meant just with respect to the initial stage, the stressful one needed to produce the breakthrough.
“There are no ansibles where we are going,” Vargas was saying, “and for security reasons we won’t be installing one. You will be out of touch with the League for at least a year. But you’ll have no cause to complain, because you will have frequent shore leaves on a world that Admiral Derham has described to me as virtually idyllic. It is a world where the entire population possesses the mind skills you have gained, and more.”
Terry sat frozen, unbelieving, as Captain Vargas announced, “The name of that world is Maclairn. Our mission is to guard it from discovery, and if necessary, from harm.”
Part Two: Maclairn
11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 - 17 - 18 - 19 - 20 - 21 - 22 - 23 - 24 - 25 - 26 - 27 - 28
~ 11 ~
Maclair
n, Captain Vargas told them, was an unauthorized colony that had only recently been discovered. It had been founded more than two hundred years back by emigrants fleeing persecution on their home planet of Undine—all of whom had possessed the capabilities in which Shepard’s crew had recently been trained. The method of teaching these capabilities had been developed in secret by a highly gifted neurologist named Ian Maclairn, who formed a group pledged to resist Undine’s tyrannical medical policies. On Undine, the government was literally run by medical officials and treatment for even minor abnormalities was enforced by law. Dead bodies had been kept on “life support” indefinitely, and still were, as far as Vargas knew. All residents were continuously tracked by implanted heart monitors and imprisoned in the hospital at the slightest sign of any health problem. Just before this last provision went into effect, Maclairn had died and his followers had managed to escape. They did it by hijacking the starship they chartered, ostensibly to take them to a legally-open world.
“We learned all this just a few months ago,” said Captain Vargas. “They deliberately isolated themselves on the world they named Maclairn, without any more supplies than the emergency pods routinely carried by a charter transport. There were only three hundred people and they nearly starved in the early years. The planet is dry and mostly rock; nothing edible grows on it but what they planted. Without their special abilities they would have died out. As it was, they established a thriving culture unlike any that has existed in human history. That was their goal—they aimed to prove that humans can move beyond the old norms by creating a society that people elsewhere would someday want to emulate. But they knew they couldn’t do it unless they were left alone to develop their mind skills and pass them from generation to generation, because the effects aren’t limited to good health and self-healing. They extend to psi powers. The people of Maclairn are telepathic, and they can do other things with their minds that you won’t believe until you observe the results.”
There were murmurs of amazement; most members of the crew didn’t yet know what he knew, Terry realized. Consciously telepathic—all the people on the planet! He’d been aware that Aldren and Roanna were not unique, but he hadn’t imagined there could be a whole world where such things were normal.
“Ian Maclairn planned all this,” Vargas went on. “He believed it was the next step in human evolution. But it could affect evolution only if the new world was someday found and observed—so he revealed their destination to a friend on Earth with instructions for his successors to seek it out after two centuries had passed. The legacy was held in trust by an institution called the Maclairn Foundation, which spent that time accumulating enough capital to buy a starship—”
“Buy one, sir?” someone questioned. “But there are no private starships capable of such an expedition. Not unless you count smugglers.”
“The existence of civilian transports isn’t widely known,” the captain agreed, “but since ownership of jump ships with minimum cargo capacity that carry no more than twelve people isn’t illegal, occasionally they are built. It’s not economical to own one if you’ve got to hire a full-time crew; that’s why companies charter ships from Fleet. The Maclairn Foundation didn’t care about economy. Their funds were dedicated to one purpose only, the discovery of the planet the followers of Ian Maclairn had headed for. Four months ago, they succeeded. They were awed by what they found.
“But they knew, and the Maclairnan leaders knew, that it had to be kept secret. Just as there would be an outcry if your own training were publicized, there’d be trouble if people were aware that such powers—and, I can tell you now, lengthened lives—are accessible on an unopened world. The planet would be invaded by hordes seeking the Fountain of Youth. Besides that, there are dogmatic scientists and their followers who won’t acknowledge the existence of psi and would feel threatened by proof of it, maybe even to the extent of resorting to violence. The Maclairnans have always intended to pass on their abilities to other worlds, but it has to be done under carefully controlled conditions.
“So when the Foundation’s expedition returned, they had to think of a way to avoid questions. A privately-owned starship is unusual enough to rouse curiosity at whatever port it comes into, and it was obvious that it had jumped; the natural supposition would be that they’d made a rich find worth the underworld’s effort to seek out. There was also some danger of attracting pirates. And so with the help of their hired crew they made it look as if they were crackpots—that they’d been hunting for an alien base that they were sure the government has been hiding.”
Aliens? They really said that? Terry thought, amused. The notion that that the government had been concealing alien contact had been cropping up ever since the twentieth century, and by now, since no aliens had ever appeared, even its adherents were becoming convinced that there weren’t any. If you wanted to be dismissed as a crackpot, it was a good story.
“The CEO of the Maclairn Foundation has connections,” Captain Vargas went on, “and he was able to get them a meeting with a few higher-ups at League headquarters. They had photographic proof of what they’d seen, of course, and a good deal of data—most members of the expedition were young scientists. And as to the psi powers, they had Aldren and Roanna.”
Oh, my God, Terry thought. No wonder they’re so special. . . .
“Aldren and Roanna are natives of Maclairn,” the captain announced. “They are the first of many who will come to the League worlds and teach their mind skills without revealing their origin. There will also be small groups of League citizens chosen by the Foundation to visit Maclairn and observe its society; Admiral Derham and his wife were members of the initial one. The goal is to gradually, over many years, spread the Maclairnans’ capabilities throughout civilization until possession of them by trustworthy individuals is so widespread that revelation of their existence won’t result in culture shock.
“But none of this can happen without the protection of Fleet. Maclairn has no wish to join the League; it will remain politically independent. However, a contract has been signed. In exchange for training given League citizens, Fleet will keep a cruiser in orbit at all times to make sure that no unauthorized ships approach the planet. No person who has not been given personal experience with its people’s abilities will be allowed to know it exists.
“We are privileged to be the vanguard, and a great responsibility has been entrusted to us. A continuous watch will be maintained throughout this solar system, and it goes without saying that the keeping of the secret hinges on the vigilance of every patroller pilot among you. But beyond that, every member of the crew will have shore leaves on Maclairn, during which it’s essential that its people be viewed neither as freakish nor as superhuman and that the differences between their culture and ours be respected. This is one reason why you have all been given mind training, so that you will feel that you’re their equals and will share their belief in the importance of what they have achieved. Fraternization will be not only permitted, but encouraged. A secondary aim of our presence here is to learn what future problems, if any, may arise in the course of contact between psi-capable people and those who lack such powers.”
Commander Dorene Hastings, the ship’s XO, rose and said, “Sir, if Dr. Aldren and his wife are typical I don’t believe anyone will have trouble adjusting.”
“I’m sure they won’t. In some ways Aldren and Roanna are exceptional, however—they’re what are known as mentors. ‘Doctor’ is a courtesy title we have given them on Titan; the Maclairnans use neither honorifics nor surnames, and their vocations are different from ours. Mentors hold the highest rank that exists in their society. Only mentors are qualified to conduct the stressful phase of mind training, as well as to serve in a number of other roles, some of which we don’t yet understand. And only they are eligible to hold the top positions in Maclairn’s government.”
Shepard’s jump had been precisely calculated, so that it had emerged in Maclairn’s solar system only two days out f
rom the planet, one of which had extra hours due to adjustment from standard Fleet time to the colony’s. Terry, like most others aboard, could barely contain his excitement during those days. Work assignments were made and patrols were organized; he inspected his ships with a new respect for their functionality. A watch was to be kept by a ring of satellites in high orbit, of course; and unmanned sensor stations would also be placed elsewhere in the solar system. But only manned patrollers could turn away any intruders that the sensors detected.
“We don’t expect any,” the captain had said. “Only once in Maclairn’s history, less than fifteen years after its founding, did an explorer come upon it, and the odds against that happening again are great since League charts show nothing of value here. Nevertheless, because the stakes are high, we must be prepared. And after training of citizens on other worlds begins, there will be a chance that the secret might get out. Then the danger will grow.”
Once close enough to Maclairn to see its features, everyone was eager for a turn in Shepard’s small observation dome, though the image on the viewscreens was equally spectacular. It was a beautiful planet from a distance, dry and barren as it was said to be. Golden, adorned with the green ribbons of planted areas and the sapphire gems of small ancient seas, it shone brilliantly against the black backdrop of space. Terry’s heart swelled and he felt a shiver of anticipation. He had seen many worlds, but never one that aroused the emotion this one did.
Destiny, Aldren had said . . . was this the place of his extraordinary destiny? Aldren had been born on this planet; he wouldn’t perceive it as extraordinary. But somehow Terry was sure that he too was connected to Maclairn. If there was such a thing as precognition, he thought, perhaps he was experiencing it now.
~ 12 ~
As soon as Shepard was in low orbit, Captain Vargas and several of the senior officers went down to meet Maclairn’s leaders. Meanwhile, the pilots took their ships out for brief test flights. Terry hadn’t flown a patroller for some time; explorers carried only shuttles. It felt great to be back in control of a fast ship, although in actuality it was AI-piloted and, except in the case of emergency maneuvers, very little skill was involved in flying it. He devoted most of his attention to the gloriously bright planet he circled, marveling not only at its beauty but at the thought of the telepathic contact he might experience there. He could hardly wait.
The Rising Flame: Box Set: Defender of the Flame + Herald of the Flame Page 7